Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

Johan Huizinga published this life of Desiderius Erasmus in 1924, and it remains the portrait most readers still reach for. He traces the illegitimate son of a Rotterdam priest through the monastery he hated, the Paris lodging houses where he nearly starved, and on into the years when his Latin prose made him the most widely read author in Europe. What emerges is a man of enormous learning and awkward temperament, a reformer who wanted the church corrected rather than broken, and who was left stranded once Luther forced everyone to pick a side. Huizinga is honest about the vanity and the flinching, which is what makes the admiration convincing. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.